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The Current Transcript for December 12, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: How do I feel about being arrested? Well number one, I am going to hold my government accountable for publicly calling me a criminal. I have been a journalist my entire life. I will continue to hold the government accountable.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Holding the government accountable in the Philippines takes a certain kind of journalistic courage and Maria Ressa has it. Refusing to duck or negotiate as the government of Rodrigo Duterte leveled charges against her and her online news website, Rappler. Instead, the woman who has been unflinching in leading a news team that's been exposing government impunity in an ugly drug war and in online media manipulation, sees this as an opportunity to shine a light on what that government is really doing. For that dedication, she is among a select group of journalists dubbed "The Guardians" by Time magazine as Person of the Year. Maria Ressa joins me in just a moment. And then.

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VOICE: I think the Chinese are very frustrated with what this is and if it gets more embarrassing to them if Madame Meng does not return to China in the near future, pressure will mount for some kind of tit for tat retaliation.

AMT: That was former Canadian ambassador to China, David Mulrooney, before news that Canadian Michael Kovrig was arrested in China. Since his arrest, Huawei CEO Meng Wanzhou is out on bail in Vancouver and the US president is musing about tying this to a better trade deal. So where is this going? We're looking at the politics at play in an extradition drama full of plot twists. That's in half an hour. And in our third half hour, the backstory behind the personality test that dominates corporate thinking.

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VOICE: That personality test you take that gives you a four letter code and it tells you if you're an introvert or an extrovert, a sensing or an intuitive, a thinker or a feeler, a judger or a perceiver.

AMT: The story of the mother daughter team that changed how many companies see their employees with Myers-Briggs. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

'In the middle of a battle,' journalist Maria Ressa, named among Time's Person of the Year, won't back down

Guests: Maria Ressa

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VOICE 1: The Philippines is moving towards authoritarian rule. Social media has been weaponized and the first targets are the journalists.

VOICE 2: Rappler, an online news site known to be critical of the government, had its license revoked.

VOICE 3: You know no one sets out to say I'm going to violate the constitution, it's the series of small decisions that in the end bends and breaks the rule of law.

VOICE 4: President Trump says there will be no new punishment against Saudi Arabia, over the killing of U.S. based journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

VOICE 1: The Philippines is a cautionary tale for the United States.

VOICE 2: When you have a community of nations and a journalist gets murdered and dismembered, who is the moral leader? This is one of those times that's going to determine who you are like what are you going to stand for? What is the line that you won't cross?

AMT: A brief introduction to Maria Ressa by Time magazine, who yesterday named her as one of the Guardians. It is an honour being given to a group of journalists who are collectively being recognized by the magazine as Person of the Year. Ms. Ressa is a longtime investigative journalist. She is the chief executive officer of the Filipino news website called Rappler. Being recognized alongside her are murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Reuters reporters Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone in prison in Myanmar, after reporting on the massacre of Rohingya Muslims that implicated the government and the Capital newspaper of Annapolis, where five employees were gunned down in the newspapers offices this past summer. Ms. Ressa and her news website, Rappler, are frequent critics of the policies and actions of the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Both Ms. Ressa and the company, Rappler, were charged with tax evasion. Ms. Ressa is currently out on bail and she's joining us from Manila. Hello.

MARIA RESSA: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: I want to say congratulations for this award, but I'm not sure that's, you're getting it because of so many challenges and dangers you face.

MR: And that's actually how I reacted when Twitter erupted last night you know after this brutal murder and then the one year anniversary of the jailing of the Reuters journalists in Myanmar, the killings in the United States, it's tough, right. We're in the middle of a battle, I think part of what this captures is this kind of existential moment for both journalism and because we're the frontline in the battle for democracy, democracies themselves.

AMT: And you're also in a court battle. You're out on bail?

MR: I am and there are many of these, I mean we started January this year with the government filing a case successfully, winning it and trying to revoke our license. We've been fighting that. We sent it. We fought it at the Court of Appeals. It's been remanded back to the Securities and Exchange Commission to the regulatory bodies, so in a way that's a victory, but there are seven or eight other government agencies that have attacked us. Our reporters and I even though I'm not a reporter anymore, you know we've been banned from reporting on anything President Duterte does, banned from being in his location. It's a year of challenges. I've filed bail on four charges of tax evasion, where the basis of the case is that Rappler is and this is the phrase in the documents, a dealer in securities. We're obviously journalists, not stockbrokers, so just at that basic foundation, it's wrong.

AMT: What do you think motivates these charges?

MR: We're challenging impunity. We're telling people there is impunity and you know it's happening on a broad scale on two fronts, a drug war that has killed, the Human Rights Watch said 12,000 in January this year, but you know our numbers, the Philippine National Police has admitted to killing 5000 people in the drug war. That's in roughly two and a half years, not even and there are also 30,000 homicide cases under investigation. That's a huge death toll. So impunity in the drug war and impunity on the weaponization of social media. Right, the disinformation campaign, information warfare that is being used against our own people, the Filipinos, to try to control and contain any critical voices. Control the public narrative.

AMT: Well let's take each of those. First for all, let's talk about the drug war because it has been really marked with extra judicial killings. How bad has it become?

MR: Bloody. We knew something was different the month that began in July of 2016. I have a team, one team that goes out and covers the drug war. We call it the impunity series. In July of 2016, they would come home every night and they would see an average of eight dead bodies on the sidewalks of Manila, the capital. That death toll now you know what the police again claim, they've killed 5000 people and the phrase, the reason why they were killed is because they, the phrase is they fought back. And you know it's very hard to believe that they fought back when some of the victims are five-year-old kids.

AMT: Well there was a verdict last month Maria in one of the most troubling cases of extra judicial killings. Tell us about the shooting death of 17-year-old, Kian delos Santos.

MR: That was a breaking point, right. So starting in July of 2016 these exponential attacks on Facebook are 97 percent of Filipinos are on Facebook. That is our internet. So these exponential attacks on Facebook against anyone who questioned the drug war, the extrajudicial killings, they were attacked brutally and it created this spiral of silence that lasted from August 2016 to August 2017, which is when Kian delos Santos was killed. He and two other young boys were killed and it was very apparent because of CCTV video. There is no way that the courts would have not found these three policemen guilty because of that CCTV video. Those three policemen by the way are the only ones that have been held accountable for the thousands killed in this drug war.

AMT: And how can that be? Is there no outcry or is there just too much fear?

MR: I think it's a combination of you know what's seeded on social media is violence that breeds fear that creates this spiral of silence and people are held back by lies that many who don't know better believe. You know the information really has business information warfare against the Filipino people and then the other part is when you mirror that in the real world, those same attacks on social media, they see again in the real world against anyone who challenges, who tries to hold power to account in the real world and then beyond that you know we've been under attack. We're not the first news group that the President Duterte's administration has attacked. In fact makes it a point to himself personally attack, you know the very first one is the largest newspaper in the Philippines, the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Within a week or so the owners said that they would sell the newspaper and we were, we became the tip of the arrow. He attacked us in July 2017 and said that we were owned by Americans and essentially that we were working to bring down the government. Immediately I tweeted because we were covering his State of the nation address, it's his annual report to the nation and I tweeted, Mr. President, you're wrong. And within a week, I had the first investigation that then became a slew of cases that has been carried, that have been filed against us.

AMT: So Maria, essentially it's the you talk about weaponizing of Facebook, it's done in tandem with what's happening on the streets. It's one part of that they're linked together.

MR: That's correct. You know the attacks against us for example were first seeded on social media and they're exponential you know when something is stated a million times, people don't know what's whether that accounts are real or fake. Facebook itself in a footnote in one of its reports that it has to file, said that the Philippines has a higher number of fake accounts than other countries than the average in other countries around the world. Facebook also by the way is the country during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the country with the most exposed accounts on Facebook is the United States. The second country with the most exposed accounts is the Philippines. So these fake accounts that drill and tell you a lie a million times that's as good as truth in this day and age. And that's where the attacks take a toll on credibility and unlike the West, in the Philippines because our institutions are so weak, news groups and journalists are really where Filipinos go to for a sense of justice. And what we saw in January of 2018 are the results of two surveys, one done in the real world, the other done from people who are on social media. The survey done in the real world is the Pew Global Attitudes Survey and it said that 86 per cent of Filipinos trust traditional media. But the survey that was done on social media of people who are on social media, that's the Edelman Trust survey, that had the complete opposite result. It said 83 per cent of Filipinos distrust traditional media. That upside down result of two different surveys in the same month, released the same month, is the result of active information warfare, disinformation that targets its citizens.

AMT: And you made the point that that 97 percent of Filipinos are using Facebook.

MR: Yes that's correct. The Internet is our Facebook.

AMT: So you met with the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, about this, what was his response to what you raised?

MR: I met him in April of 2017 and you know I was there were about a dozen of us who are founders of companies that work closely with Facebook. I brought up, you know I invited him to come to the Philippines and I said you have to see how powerful Facebook is here because I stated the fact 97 percent of Filipinos on the Internet are on Facebook and he kind of frowned. And I said wait why and he said wait wait, Maria, what are the other 3 percent doing? And you know we all laughed, but when I talked to him later you know I pointed out you really have to understand how powerful the disinformation networks that are being created on Facebook that are inciting hate and violence against journalists, the impact they're having on people like me.

AMT: What do you think Facebook should be could be doing?

MR: I've talked about this so much. You know we are we know the best and the worst of Facebook. Rappler is a startup in 2012 and we, our mantra was social media for social good. I drank the kool aid and I believed that part of the part of the way we could help build institutions in the Philippines was bottom up with the use of social media. We went to schools to help college students learn how to use Facebook to organize, to create institutions bottom up. But in 2015, during the campaign and in 2016, remember President Duterte was elected in May of 2016. Brexit happened a month later and then President Trump was elected in November. When this happened, we became the first targets of attacks, precisely because we live on social media and the way we fought back is by using the data. I gave this data to Facebook in August of 2016, that's how long ago it was and I wanted them to fix it. I showed them how this was being used and you know I kind of, this was in Singapore and I was talking to three officers and I said look, if you don't fix this, you have U.S. elections and Trump could win. And you know at that point in August 2016, it didn't look like Trump would win right, but we all laughed and then in November of 2016 when he won they asked me for the data again. We're working with them again now because I believe that they I pitched them enlightened self-interest. You know it's important. Facebook can be a force for good. And the first thing they need to do is to take down the toxic sludge that has polluted our environment.

AMT: So you identified the potential in all of this before others could even see that and now you're talking about using efforts to dismantle online terrorist networks as a useful model to target disinformation campaigners on social media.

MR: Absolutely. You know this is something that I mean I've seen it in the real world. So when I was with CNN what I worked on was I tried to understand how their ideology, this radical virulent ideology, why would young men want to kill themselves? You know and just this year in Surabaya in Indonesia, whole families killed themselves, became suicide bombers. What would trigger that? And a lot of this radicalization translated from physical meetings to the online world. So this is I think the solution is very similar, but they would need to understand the culture, just the way counterterrorism, folks who work on counterterrorism understand the environment they work in, how people recruit because these accounts, it's very hard to use machine learning or artificial intelligence, if you do not understand the culture in each of the countries that you operate in.

AMT: What other similarities do you see, where else are you raising red flags because of what =of the experience of the Philippines?

MR: There's so many. You know in December of 2016, I was in California at a Google News lab and I said we're the cautionary tale for the United States. When President Duterte called Rappler fake news, a week after President Trump called CNN and The New York Times fake news and you know President Duterte bannedd our palace reporter. Earlier this year, President Trump did the exact same thing a month ago, right. So it's we are a global, the boundaries of nation states are gone. And I think that's the biggest thing right, Facebook unites 2.3 billion people. A lie told in the United States travels all the way to the Philippines and back and they evolve and depending on how this information is used, one lie for example that appeared in the West first and has been used against us, is the role of George Soros, right. And this kind of anti-Semitism that frankly anti-Semitism isn't even really a word that's culturally known in the Philippines, but Soros is used as a bogeyman by the disinformation networks to say that he controls and owns Rappler and that he means to take down the Duterte administration. These are lies. In the old days when we had gatekeepers, they would never get into a public space and I think this is where the social media platforms fail. They have to realize that now that they've become the world's largest distributor of news that they also must take over our responsibility as gatekeepers and they need to make decisions about fact and fiction.

AMT: So much of what you're saying you know you're saying it in a place where as you point out, the government acts with impunity, there is a real and devastating violence. You are not just a target of the courts, I mean this is really challenging work. What keeps you going? How do you get to be so fearless doing this, knowing how your government operates?

MR: You know the phrase I've used, it's been two and a half years that we've been under attack and the phrase I use is #holdtheline. You know it make sense, it's on social media, #holdtheline. I don't think about it as courage, I think about it as you know who are you? Who am I? What are the values and the principles I live by. I've been a journalist for more than 30 years and at the end of last year I realized that we can't do, we can't duck right now and not be who we are. Rappler was created by a group of founders who have extensive experience in investigative reporting. We're in the twilight of our careers. I'm 55, but we hired the smartest 20 somethings we could find when we founded this in 2012 and now they I think are fearless journalists, but we feed off each other and it comes down to what are your values? Why are you doing this? I think the reason why we can do what we're doing is because the largest group of shareholders, the one single group of shareholders that controls Rappler are the journalists. And if we were driven by businessmen, we probably wouldn't have been able to make the mission driven decisions we did and you know it forced us to find new business models because when you go up against the government, you're also challenged right. Advertisers get scared, but I like it. We've survived this year and we've stuck to our values and you know in the twilight of my career, I'm not about to render my entire life and career meaningless by not standing up when it matters.

AMT: That is so admirable and so inspirational to hear you talk like that. Thank you for your work. Thank you for taking the time today.

MR: Not at all. Thank you for listening.

AMT: Maria Ressa, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Editor of Rappler, the online news website based in the Philippines, longtime investigative journalist. She's part of a group of journalists who are collectively being recognized as Time magazine's Person of the Year. And Maria Reza joined us from Manila. Let us know what you think of what she had to say. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us, the news is next. Then the arrest of Michael Kovrig in China is raising concerns that Canada and Canadians will pay a heavy political price for the extradition proceedings underway for the CFO of Huawei. We'll be talking about that. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Arrest of former Canadian diplomat suggests China 'doesn't respect the rule of law,' says former ambassador

Guests: David Mulroney, Guy St.Jacques, Sophie Richardson

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test has been billed as a great tool for self understanding, but to critics it's an unscientific weapon for corporate labour management. In half an hour we wade into the strange backstory of Myers-Briggs, a personality test that is both pervasive and profitable. But first, concerns for a detained Canadian in China.

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VOICE: This is a Canadian citizen being impacted by a diplomatic spat that really erupted because it's hard to separate the Chinese state from media, corporations, diplomacy. This is our main concern with China is that there is total control of the state in all they do and so if now Canadian citizens are being entangled. I'm concerned.

AMT: That is Ontario Conservative MP and foreign affairs critic, Erin O'Toole, yesterday on the arrest of a former Canadian diplomat in China. Michael Kovrig worked at the Canadian embassy in China from 2014 to 2016. He is now on leave and he's been working for the Brussels-based think tank the International Crisis Group, serving as its senior advisor for Northeast Asia. In New York yesterday the Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said the government is on the case.

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VOICE: We've been in touch with Mr. Kovrig's family and we have raised the issue with the Chinese authorities as we do always and you know we, I want to say you know especially if his family members are hearing us tonight, this has our attention at the very highest levels of our government. We're very, very focused on it and you know, know that we are concerned.

AMT: Today China's Foreign Ministry denied knowledge of the detention of Mr. Kovrig, while maintaining that the activities of the International Crisis Group in China are illegal because it is not registered in the country. Meanwhile, the Kovrig family is also very concerned.

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VOICE: There's a bit of shock when you see your own last name and given that our last name is not a particularly common one, when you see that in print in relation to an international incident that could have serious ramifications across the board for lots of different people. It's kind of an usual sensation. This clearly is to me just a measure of retaliatory action that it hurts that it's a member of my family,. but you know my first concern is about knowing and hoping that he is safe and secure and that he will come back.

AMT: That is Neil Kovrig, Michael Kovrig's cousin, talking to us from San Diego California yesterday. He's not the only one who thinks this may be a tit for tat move on the part of the Chinese. The arrest of Michael Kovrig is happening against the backdrop of the arrest in the extradition case of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of the Chinese telecoms giant, Huawei. As she was being released on bail yesterday in Vancouver, the US president Donald Trump was musing that in an interview with Reuters that he would intervene if it would help secure a trade deal between China and the US. My guests today have some insight into what all of this might mean or what we should watch for. Guy St.Jacques was Canada's ambassador to China from 2012 to 2016. He was also Michael Kovrig's boss. He joins us from Montreal. David Mulroney is also a former ambassador to China. He is currently a fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs. And he joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello gentlemen. Good morning.

DAVID MULRONEY: Good morning, Anna Maria.

GUY ST.JACQUES: Good morning.

AMT: Guy St.Jacques, let's begin with you. What did you think when you first heard of this arrest?

GSJ: Well I was pretty distressed because Michael is a great officer. You may know that he used to be a journalist, so he brought this analytical sense to the job and I can tell you that his reports were very well read. Furthermore he is someone who loves China, who loves the Chinese people and that's why at the end of his posting he decided to take a leave of absence to remain. And I said well if that's what you want to do, it's OK, but I hope that you will come back to this party because we really need someone with your skills and competency. So I find all of this very sad and unfortunately Michael knows also now what he is going to go through because we had to deal with a very serious case when he was, when we were in Beijing together. You may recall that a Chinese citizen was arrested in Vancouver, accused of spying and the Americans asked us to extradite him to the U.S. and about a week later a couple of Canadian missionaries, Kevin and Julia Garrett were arrested and it was clear at that time that they wanted to make a swap. And we told them there's no way we can do that. We have to live by the terms of the extradition treaty and you cannot put political pressure, we are not going to do what's what, but when I spoke with the Garretts afterwards, you can imagine that the detention conditions are far from ideal. It's not a club med and so I have a lot of sympathy for what Michael is going through now.

AMT: So you're telling me that this follows a pattern.

GSJ: Yes and that's why I've said that there is no coincidence with China and unfortunately we are dealing with what I call the new China that is a lot more assertive, aggressive, where they want to make us feel that we are the junior partner and you know despite the fact that the claim that China is now governed by the rule of law, still there is a parallel system of justice there that is decided by the Communist Party and it will be very difficult to convince them. And so what I am afraid is that we are we may be entering in a period of turbulence in the bilateral relationship because they will want to continue to put pressure on Canada to let Ms. Meng return to China. I hope that the fact that she is now out on bail will lower the temperature, but still I wouldn't be surprised if they cancel ministerial visits, if they cancel contracts because they will want us to feel the pain. And why is that? Well Huawei is one of the flagship Chinese companies, the second largest manufacturer in the world, plus the founder of Huawei, Mr. Ren is very well-connected in Beijing and so this has to be seen in the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and China and the fear in China that the U.S. is trying to confine the country.

AMT: David Mulroney, what are you thinking?

DM: Well first Guy, I didn't have the pleasure and the privilege of working with Michael, but I knew of him and I knew his sterling reputation. So I felt sick when I heard that he was missing and I think Minister Freeland struck the right tone. We're going to have to be quiet and constructive, but very persistent in working with the Chinese. The other thing that struck me this morning is you know we've been focused as Guy mentioned on China's lack of respect for the rule of law. President Trump's statement that he might intervene in this is tremendously disturbing and it seems that he has problems understanding the rule of law. Fortunately that's not true of the U.S. system and so I think the watchword for Canada right now is not to be distracted by what's coming out of the Chinese foreign ministry or even what's coming out of the White House, but to focus on doing the right thing as we are doing the right thing in terms of the current arrest and investigation of that Madame Meng and it's following all of the correct procedures. She's had her day in court, she's got a good lawyer. The media is covering it. Chinese protesters are allowed to be present and keep it separate from whatever has happened to Mr. Kovrig. The reason that Canadian diplomats are respected and the reason that the International Crisis Group is respected is because they follow the rules and they respect the laws of the country that they're in. I have no doubt that that's the case. Michael's a distinguished journalist, diplomat and representative of a non-governmental organization and I'm encouraged that Minister Freeland's going to work really hard to secure his release.

AMT: I just want to put in a little more on what Mr. Trump said because you made the point there. He was speaking to Reuters yesterday and Reuters, which did the interview said that he says he would intervene with the U.S. Justice Department in the case of this telecommunications executive, if it would help secure a trade deal with Beijing. And then he goes on. Here's the quote. "It's possible that a lot of things could happen. It's possible it will be part of negotiations, but we will speak to the Justice Department. We'll speak to them. We'll get a lot of people involved." David Mulroney if you're reading that and you're on the, you're either working for Ms. Meng's defense or you're the Chinese government, shat do you take from that?

DM: Of course it's going to be used unhelpfully by the Chinese, but the point is Mr. Trump as we've seen again and again, does not represent the entire workings of the U.S. government. In fact he's got his own problems with the Justice Department it appears in the United States. So I think as distracting and discouraging as that is, we have to treat it as background noise. The people in the Justice Department who have asked us to arrest Madame Meng will have the chance to make their case. I'm sure they'll do it professionally and I'm sure Madame Meng will have and she has a great legal team who will defend her. That's how the system works. And what's really important is it has to work that way for a country like Canada, that's a middle power because we need an international system where even the big powers like the United States and China play by the rules. Unfortunately in all of this as we're sort of caught up in the daily drama of this, there's a larger story for us and it's about the world we're entering. We're coming to the end of a period where we counted on the United States to represent and to protect our security and to guarantee our prosperity. They'll still do that to an extent, but we're much more on our own. And if we're not taking this lesson, we should be. We need to summon up the courage and the competence and we've got both, to navigate in a world that's getting much more dangerous.

AMT: Guy St.Jacques, how does Canada navigate between those monoliths, China and the United States when Canada is looking at the rule of law and it's been given this extradition request, but we see that there are other political things at play here.

GSJ: Well I think unfortunately we end up as collateral victims of this situation between the U.S. and China and it put us really in a very difficult place because again we have to let the legal process. Dave is entirely right that this is a serious process and the musing of Mr. Trump in fact undermines the notion of rule of law and will be used by the Chinese government. In this case you know the Chinese government normally would be going after the U.S. because the U.S. is the source of the problem, as much as they have requested the extradition of Ms. Meng, but they are in this 90 day truce that has been agreed by the two presidents to try to resolve their economic problems and those are serious. They are already starting to create economic hardship in China. Unemployment is going up in some parts of the country and there's lots of voices that are criticizing President Xi Jinping for the way that he has handled the relationship with the U.S. Canada on the other hand, up until this point, I think that our relationship with China was good, despite the fact that they would have liked to start with us negotiations to conclude the Free Trade Agreement, but now we are in no position to do that following the conclusion of the new agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico and clause 32.10 that says that in fact this clause has reduced considerably our flexibility. And so for Canada it will be very difficult to manage this because the Chinese will continue to put pressure on us. You know they have no one else to kick around and unfortunately this whole process could drag on for some time. Ms. Meng will want to use all the legal recourses that are available to delay her extradition to the US. And so I think that for the government at this stage, it's important to speak with the Chinese to try to lower the temperature, but I think it will really complicate the relationship.

AMT: David Mulroney, do you think there's any kind of back channel communication going on with Washington now with Canada, saying what the hell?

DM: There may be, but I think by now people realize, I'm sure Washington is saying what the hell. This is President Trump. There's something else at play here though and it's because this whole crisis that involves Huawei, it's a question of you know the trade and technology. It touches on U.S.-China negotiations, it touches on the Iran sanctions. Now it touches on the security of people in China, foreigners in China. What's the connecting link? The connecting link in all of this is and are allegations that China doesn't respect the rule of law, but it's something of a free rider. If the allegations about Huawei and Iran are true and they're still allegations and there have been other allegations about China and North Korea sanctions and another Chinese firm has paid fines for allegedly for violating U.N. sanctions, it's an example of China as a free rider. You know avoiding the sanctions, continuing to sell to Iran, continuing to burnish its reputation as a champion of the developing world. The whole U.S.-China trade dispute is about the tensions in a 30 year arrangement where China has continued to flout the international trade rules, continues to be a mercantilist power. And what's happening to Michael Kovrig and it's happened to a succession of other people, including missionaries, teachers. There's a British investigator who was investigating a Chinese company, he's been held, a Swedish human rights worker. It all comes down to a China that continues to evade its responsibilities. Long ago, a very senior American trade negotiator named Robert Zoellick said that we should hope that China becomes a responsible stakeholder. That has never happened and it's never happened in part because when each of these crises erupts, everyone worries about wrings their hands and China gets a pass. At some point China has to stop getting a pass.

AMT: OK well we'll wait to see what happens because there are real people in the balance there. Thank you both of you for your thoughts on this today.

DM: Thank you very much Anna Maria.

GSJ: Thank you very much.

AMT: That's David Mulroney, former ambassador to China from 2009 to 2012, currently a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs. He's in our Toronto studio. Guy St.Jacques is a former ambassador to China. He was there from 2012 to 2016. He joined us from Montreal. As friends and colleagues worry about why Michael Kovrig has been detained, many familiar with the detention of foreigners in China are concerned about how he is being detained and what hope he has for any kind of due process in all of this. Sophie Richardson is the China director for Human Rights Watch. She joins us from Washington. Hello.

SOPHIE RICHARDSON: Good morning, how are you?

AMT: Well, I'm well. Thank you. When you hear about the arrest of someone like former diplomat Michael Kovrig in China, what are the first concerns that come to mind from a human rights perspective?

SR: Well first and foremost by whom is someone being detained? Does that person have access to consular officials and have we seen the authorities who are detaining the person in question, make even the most basic of gestures towards the rule of law? I think that the comments that you just heard from Guy St. Jacques and David Mulroney are spot on about the rule of law in China and really how thin it is. I think the fact that you know the authorities that no authorities, as far as we can tell, have provided the notifications to Mr. Kovrig's family within the required 24 hour period is a worrying sign.

AMT: So based on your knowledge of the Chinese system, what kind of treatment could he be facing right now?

SR: Well it is generally the case that foreigners who are detained are treated better than average Chinese citizens. But you know Chinese detention centers or off the books places where people are held because sometimes in homes or hotels or in party or other government facilities, you know it's not where anybody goes for due process or good health. You know there have certainly been cases of foreigners who have been physically ill treated and obviously being arbitrarily detained for any period of time, can quickly rise to a level of psychological torture. And that's why it is imperative for the authorities to clarify its whereabouts, his status and his well-being immediately.

AMT: So what do you make of the fact that the Associated Press was reporting this morning that the Foreign Ministry today denied knowledge of his detention?

SR: I think I think the foreign ministry's denial, to put it politely, strains credulity. I'm sure they're quite well where or capable of knowing exactly what's happening. It's also been reported that he was detained on Monday by state security, not by regular police, but by the police who handle issues related to intelligence. You know the authorities have yet to confirm that, but I think it is really in China's interest to clarify these things as soon as possible. You know we've seen case after case after case of foreigners being detained that authorities are reluctant to inform their government to give their consular officials access to them and that can be critically important in the long run.

AMT: How common are detentions of foreigners in China?

SR: You know it's a great question. You know one doesn't have the perfect data set, even of you know how many people are detained domestically, these things are kept secret. But there have been a number of very high profile cases that are worrying. Arguably one of the worst, about a decade ago, was when a British citizen named Ahmad Shaikh was executed after being convicted on drug smuggling charges, despite the fact that the British government had made repeated interventions that he was suffering from bipolar disorder and that his case should have exempted from criminal responsibility, even under Chinese law. There's also the case that Mr. Mulroney referred to a moment ago, another British citizen named Peter Humphreys, who was detained for allegedly illegally obtaining private personal information. He was made to confess on national television. He's now been released and is back in the UK and has published some fairly harrowing material about how he was treated in detention, including being compelled to provide forced labour.

AMT: And once somebody is taken in, how convoluted, how complex is it to get them out?

SR: It can be extremely difficult. You know the Chinese government is very sort of mechanical about prosecutions, so that as soon as somebody has been detained and then when they're charged, at each step of that process, it becomes much more difficult to get charges dropped to get somebody released. You know which is why these first couple of days really can matter a great deal.

AMT: The Chinese Foreign Ministry has called Ms. Meng's detention here in Canada, now she's out on bail, a violation of her human rights. What do you make of the comparison or contrast to the situation of Mr. Kovrig or others arrested?

SR: Well I don't, I wouldn't necessarily compare the two cases. You know we urge the Chinese government to clarify what human rights violation it sees in the Canadian government's handling of Ms. Meng's case. To the best of our knowledge, she is sitting in an open court room with access to the information or the evidence that's being presented against her. She has at least one, if not more than one lawyer of her choice. Her husband is there, her family is fully informed. There are more journalists in that courtroom that you can shake a stick at. It seems there are unmolested protesters outside the courtroom. So where the human rights violation is, we're not too clear. They're welcome to give us a call for a tutorial if they need one, but you know I think what's happening in Vancouver is you know is an example of how a criminal prosecution ought to work with all of the protection that's built in.

AMT: So where do you see this all going?

SR: Well you know I don't have the ability to comment well on Ms. Meng's case because those are issues that are necessarily sailing to our portfolio. The espionage and Huawei-related charges. But I think Mr. Kovrig's situation is very serious and that's you know we obviously document hundreds of cases like these against people from China too being arbitrarily detained and prosecuted on spurious charges. I think the Chinese government has really put its abuse of nature in the spotlight again with Mr. Kovrig's case, the way it did with the detention of Meng Hongwei, who was the head of Interpol, who has disappeared when he went home in September and I think it's showing the entire world just how capricious and how arbitrarily state power can and will be used against Chinese and foreigners alike inside China.

AMT: Sophie Richardson, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your insights.

SR: Thank you.

AMT: Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch. She joined us from Washington. As you listen to this, if you are, I'm wondering what you're thinking. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent, as this story advances with more twists. Stay with us, in our next half hour, chances are you've taken what's been called the most important personality test on the planet, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. There are questions around how scientific its findings really are. We'll tell you more. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Myers-Briggs tests in the workplace help the employer, not the employee, says author

Guests: Merve Emre

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Steven, I have a very comprehensive report.

VOICE 2: So what am I? That drum roll please.

VOICE 1: You are an INFP.

VOICE 2: INFP?

VOICE 1: Yes.

VOICE 2: STFU!

[Laughter and applause]

VOICE 2: So INFP. Is that a good one?

VOICE 1: Introversion, intuition, feeling, perceiving. It's typically the most brilliant, creative, intellectual minds.

[Cheering and applause]

VOICE 2: Intellectual minds.

VOICE 1: William Shakespeare.

VOICE 2: Okay not too shabby.

VOICE 1: Tim Burotn.

VOICE 2: Yes. What he did the Johnny Depp to Johnny Depp?

VOICE 1: Johnny Depp is another.

VOICE 2: What?

AMT: Well that was Late Night Talk host Stephen Colbert getting the good news from Julie Raynor Gross a master practitioner of the Myers Briggs type indicator the MBTI as it's commonly known. Myers Briggs type syndicator was first developed in 1943. It is the most widely used personality test today. Universities, Fortune, 500 companies, as well as other companies big and small, even the CIA use it. To believer's Myers Briggs is a great tool for self-understanding. To critics it's an unscientific weapon for corporate labor management. Merve Amre investigated MBTI and the mother daughter team who developed it. Merve Amre is an associate professor of English at Oxford University and what she discovered is in her book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Merve Emre is with me in Toronto. Hello.

MERVE EMRE: Hi. Thank you for having me.

AMT: For those not familiar with it what is the Myers Briggs type indicator?

MERVE EMRE: It is the most popular personality assessment tool in the world. And what it does is it assesses your personality along for different dimensions. Each dimension is mapped out by two dichotomies. So I can run through them.

AMT: Go ahead. It's not many but we need to understand.

MERVE EMRE: Yes of course. So the first dichotomy is extroversion and introversion. Where is it that you derive your energy from? Do you derive it from being around lots of people? Or do you drive it from being alone with your own thoughts? The second is sensing an intuition which is how do you perceive the world. Do you perceive it through your senses? Or do you have gut instincts hunches about it that you are attuned to? The third is thinking and feeling which is about how you make decisions. Do you tend to make decisions in a highly rational logical and objective way? Or are you attentive to the ways your decisions will affect people's feelings? And the fourth is judging and perceiving. How you go about organizing your life? What your attitude is toward organization? Are you somebody who likes to have a schedule, who likes sticking to it? Or are you someone who thrives on spontaneity, someone who loves to be flexible?

AMT: Spell it out. How prevalent is it in North America today?

MERVE EMRE: So it is estimated that one in every five of Fortune 1000 companies uses the indicator for hiring purposes. It is used regularly at eighty nine of the Fortune 100 companies. It is in 86 different countries. It has been translated into over two dozen different languages. It is across the globe.

AMT: I want to ask you about Catherine Briggs, the Brigg's in Myers Briggs. Tell us about her.

MERVE EMRE: So she was born in Michigan. She went to college at the age of 14 and she graduated from college number one in her class. And the man Lyman Briggs that she would ultimately marry was number two.

AMT: And this is in the 1800s. So this is even more extraordinary.

MERVE EMRE: Yes yes absolutely yes. This is in 1883. And when they got married there was no expectation that she would continue her education that she would ever be anything other than a mother and a wife. And she had three children two of whom died in very early infancy and the remaining one was a daughter named Isabelle, who she thought was an extraordinary little girl. And because she had suffered with the deaths of her children, she wanted to find a way to make her girl the most extraordinary version of herself that she could be. And so she started experimenting on her.

AMT: Experimenting How so?

MERVE EMRE: So she opened what she called a cosmic laboratory of baby training and she started doing drills with her daughter to teach her how to be obedient. So she would have her daughter hover her fingers over an open flame and then spat her hands and say 'No no don't touch'. And for her daughters obedience her daughter was rewarded with stories. So she would animate the objects in the house for her daughter. She would pretend that the rugs in the living room were alive that the chairs in the kitchen were alive that they would talk to her daughter. And her daughter grew up amidst this mix of punishing drills and imaginative play. And Catherine referred to herself as an obedience curiosity mother. But she was trying to cultivate both obedience and curiosity in her daughter.

AMT: Before we go further let's just go back for a minute in your research because I don't want to just skate over the fact- your attempts to find out more about her though, there were people who just didn't want you to know too much about Catherine.

MERVE EMRE: There were people who didn't want me to know about Isabelle and Catherine. So the primary archival source that documents Isabel Briggs Myers life is at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her papers are there her personal papers and they are controlled by the Myers Briggs Foundation and the Center for the application of psychological type CAPT. And when I started my research into the indicator the first thing I did was right to CAPT and say I would like to come look at Isabel's personal papers. Can I fly down to Florida? And for about nine months we were in this ongoing conversation where they would interview me over the phone. They would have psychologists talk to me over the phone. At one point they actually flew up to New York where I was living and I had to go out to lunch with one of the vice presidents and her husband. And finally they said 'look there's one last step before we can give you access to these archives. You have to go to a weeklong re-education program. And once you've completed successfully then we will let you into the archives.' So I went to this weeklong program and at the end of it I was told that there were things that they had discovered about me through the program that they did not like and so they did not want to admit me into the archives. And so then I got mad and then I got productive and I started looking for other sources that could help me tell this story, which is what led me to Catherine's papers in Michigan. It's what led me to Zurich to the papers of Carl Young who's thinking the indicator draws on. It led me to Australia to the home of a man named Peter Guyer who was instrumental in helping spread the indicator in the 70s and the 80s. It led me to Berkeley to the Institute of personality assessment and research where famous writers like Truman Capote and William Carlos Williams were given the MBTI in the 50s and the 60s. And it led me to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton New Jersey which administers the SAT now and in the 70s was on the lookout for a personality test that could do for personality testing what the SAT had done for aptitude testing.

AMT: Note to future research people don't get in Merve Emre way, because she will find a way around it. What's your personality type that made you do that?

MERVE EMRE: Oh I'm an ENTJ I'm the commander or less generously the dictator type.

AMT: Okay, there we go. So you mentioned Carl Young, let's talk about him, the Swiss psychiatrist who plays a major role in the path to all of this. How so?

MERVE EMRE: Catherine and Isabel have this very very close relationship. And when Isabel goes off to college her mother falls into this very deep depression. And she says 'the experiment that was my life's work has now come to an end' and she has no idea what to do with herself. And in 1923 she reads a review of Carl Young's newly published book Psychological Types in the New Republic and she sends out for the book right away and she starts reading it. And she spends the next five years doing nothing but copying the pages of the book out in longhand on these little three by five index cards that she has. She becomes completely fascinated with his dissection of human personality and his understanding of the world as being divided into people of different types. And she becomes fixated with Young. So her obsession becomes more than just intellectual she starts to write to him. She says that she wants to become a kind of amateur psycho analyst and she wants him to guide her in this quest. She writes erotic fan fiction about him. She writes songs and hymns to him.

AMT: Catherine Briggs believes that understanding types can help a person meet himself or herself. What did she mean by that?

MERVE EMRE: Catherine's approach to type was deeply spiritual. She believed that everybody had a soul and that part of saving that soul meant understanding that soul, knowing who that soul was. And it meant encountering yourself so that you could become the master and arbiter of your own destiny. And you could do it in a way that was not judgmental, that was not self-hating. You could come to love the person you were and not apologize for who you were.

AMT: You can see where that could be very attractive, though.

MERVE EMRE: Of course I mean and this is part of the premise of the book which is that while the indicator itself may not be scientifically valid or reliable, and while its institutional history is deeply troubling to me and exploitative to me, I do not want to deny the individual experiences that people have with the type indicator. Which is that oftentimes when people learn who they are they feel seen, they feel liberated, they feel like they have a new lease on life to be cliché about it.

AMT: So how did the Myers Briggs Type Indicator finally come to be so?

MERVE EMRE: After Isabel went to Ridge she got married. She worked for a while as a very successful mystery novelist and then she had two children and she decided that that was going to be her purpose. She was going to be a wife and a mother. And she did that until her children went off for college. And that was right around when World War II started and with World War II there came this explosion in the labor force in the United States and the rise of all sorts of different personality tests to figure out how to match workers to the jobs that were best suited to them. And Isabel when her children went off for college was also searching for a new project, the same way her mother had done, and she apprenticed herself to a one of the first personnel management consultants in the United States a man named Edward N. Hay who had a really really long list of different kinds of personality tests and Isabel was responsible for trying to validate those tests. And as she was working her way through them she realized that there were two problems with the tests. The first was that they were often designed to separate normal from abnormal types of people. And she thought wouldn't it be nice to have a test that didn't tell you that some people are normal and others are abnormal, but just said here is the type of person you are and here is what you would be good at doing.

AMT: No wrong answer.

MERVE EMRE: Exactly. So she said What if I could design an indicator that gave people a really clear and compelling language for talking about who they were, but also allowed their employers to sort them and to match them to the jobs that were best suited for them. And she sat down at her kitchen table and she started designing this forced choice questionnaire which means there are two answers and you have to pick one. And she started doing it by asking her daughter and her son and her husband questions about their preferences. So she would say things like you know if you see the fire engine going down the street are you more inclined to follow it to see where it's going and where the fire is? Or are you more inclined to just go about your day? And she would ask them these kinds of prosaic suburban questions and from those questions she built these types with the language she borrowed from her mother and from Young.

AMT: How did her mother react? What did she think of the indicator when she first saw?

MERVE EMRE: Well this is really interesting to me because Catherine was very much against the use of a questionnaire to try to determine type. And she told her daughter that she had spent the entire second half of her life making herself into a person who had a kind of rarefied and special access to other people's souls, and she didn't believe that that kind of work should be outsourced onto something like a questionnaire. And she has this really lovely line that's from earlier in her life but it applies here to where she says 'science lacks the data that the soul possesses'.

AMT: Some of the harshest criticism directed at Myers and Briggs is that they were a couple of amateurs with no real background in psychiatry. I want you to hear a clip. This is from the television show Adam Ruins Everything.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Mama I'm bored of writing mystery novels. Everyone else is off having fun at war.

VOICE 2: Say. I have an idea. I just read some old Carl Young book about personality types. And I bet most, us too; unqualified nobodies could do a better job.

VOICE 1: Yes. Let's do some science or whatever. Let's create an influential task that will be widely used for decades.

AMT: Merve Emrah Oh you're not impressed. How did defenders of this respond to criticism that Myers and Briggs were not qualified to design a personality indicator? And you just heard them the poking fun there.

MERVE EMRE: Can I just start by pointing out how astonishingly sexist that clip is. My book really wants to take seriously the idea that doing domestic work could teach you something about the world and could produce a valuable kind of knowledge. And so the way in which that clip makes fun of the blend of the personal and the professional ignores the fact that many of the leading psychologists of the time, including Henry Murray, Donald McKinnon Young himself, were people who were very actively bringing their personal and their sexual lives to bear on their professional practices of analysis.

AMT: But you also make the point that there's no basis in scientific fact for this.

MERVE EMRE: No there isn't. I mean and to me that's not as interesting as asking, Well, given that we already know it's not based in science, why is it that people continue to believe in it with the kind of ardor that one often sees reserved for matters of the deepest faith? Why is it that even if you know it doesn't mean anything in a kind of rational objective sense that we still use words like introvert and extrovert in our everyday conversation to describe the people that we know, and to describe ourselves? That to me is not a scientific or even a psychological question. That's a question about culture. That's a question for humanists to answer.

AMT: You say attempts to find a more perfect type of man promotes many disingenuous ideas about race, gender, class, social perfectibility ideas that have motivated and continue to motivate terrible forms of bias and discrimination, and I'm quoting there, how does it do that?

MERVE EMRE: Well I think an interesting experiment is to think about who can even take the questionnaire in the first place. So when I was at the re-education program there was a college counselor there who worked at a college in Minnesota where 70 percent of his students were the first person in their family to go to college. They were immigrants. They were women. They were students of color. They were coming from lower class backgrounds. And one of the things that he asked at the program was you know some of these questions are not even culturally legible to my students when they encounter them, because they can never imagine themselves in the position of someone who has a stable job and has to decide how they approach that job on a day to day basis, or someone who is planning for a vacation and has to decide where to go. And he asked the woman leading the program he said how do I account for this? What do I do when it seems like this instrument is only directed at a white upper middle class suburban population? And she said ‘Well that is just what the pool of success looks like?’ And your students will have to learn to swim in it and better that they learn now than later. And so I think many many personality inventories are used to prop up already existing hierarchies of race and class and gender. And if we wanted to I could take you further back into the history of the indicator to show the ways in which these hierarchies were quite explicitly acknowledged in the design of the indicator.

AMT: Well give me a few examples.

MERVE EMRE: Sure. So when it was initially designed in the 40s there were different answer sheets for men and for women. And the assumption was that women were always going to be biologically more inclined to feeling. Another example when the indicator was originally being used Isabel Briggs Myers claimed that nobody with an IQ under 100 had a differentiable personality type. And so the only people who got to have personalities were people who were already highly intelligent people, who already had access to powerful jobs, people who were overwhelmingly white and male.

AMT: That's so interesting because the times have changed like our perceptions have changed. We realize this now. Right but we're still using tools from another era.

MERVE EMRE: Yes and I'm thinking just recently there's this case that's gotten a lot of attention in the U.S. which is that Harvard University's admissions department had a personality assessment, and overwhelmingly Asian American applicants were described as not being likable or warm and they were often described as being like automatons or robots. And these judgments were used to deny them application to Harvard. But you can see the way in which that exact logic of who gets to have access to a personality that still has a presence in our everyday culture in our everyday lives. And it shapes people's lives in in horrifying ways.

AMT: Well that's why it's so important here this backstory to understand where this is all coming from as we look at what's going on today. Why have big corporations been so interested in giving their perspective employees personality tests?

MERVE EMRE: So when the Myers Briggs type indicator was first designed in the 40s through say the 60s the interest was really in figuring out a quick and easy and cheap way to match workers to the jobs that were best suited to their abilities. Later on, once you get to the 70s the 80s and the 90s, corporate culture really becomes infected with this idea that work is something that you should love. It should be a source of self-actualisation. Then one of the things that you see are these tests being given to help workers figure out how to find the things that are right for them so that they can bind themselves freely and gladly to the work that they do, and they're doing it in a way that takes care of their psyches as well as turns profits for the corporation.

AMT: I was just going to say so what was this indicator administered for the benefit of the corporation or the employee?

MERVE EMRE: Well it's definitely for the benefit of the corporation and the corporation of course is presenting it as if it's for the benefit of the employee. And one of the really interesting moments in the history of that type indicator for me is when the Educational Testing Services is trying to validate the indicator in the 50s the 60s and even up to the early 70s. They very quickly realized that they can't validate it, that it's not valid or reliable. But they say you know oftentimes corporations will give people a whole battery of personality tests and many of the test they're giving them do label people as being abnormal or normal, good or bad. What if we also gave them the indicator and then gave them their results on the indicator. So they felt like we were doing them the service of self-discovery. And at the same time we could use all of those to actually make our hiring decisions and weed out the good apples from the bad apples. So it becomes you know really this way of manipulating employees into believing that the corporation is looking out for their best interests, that the corporation does care about their selves.

AMT: Were there concerns that companies were digging deeply into the minds of the people they were hiring?

MERVE EMRE: I mean I think there continue to be. There have been a number of really interesting lawsuits filed in the states on both the state and the federal level about the privacy violations that these kinds of tests or indicators enact on the people that are asked to take them. This is of course compounded by the fact that many of these methods of assessment are not valid or reliable. But I think the bigger question is why is it that our psyches, why is it that our interiors should be made available to the people that we work for? Why is that something that they should have access to and why should work be a source of self-validation?

AMT: These are all good questions.

MERVE EMRE: [Laughs] [unintelligible].

AMT: What eventually happens to Catharine Briggs?

MERVE EMRE: Katharine Briggs dies in the mid-60s of dementia and very shortly thereafter her daughter Isabelle is diagnosed with cancer and enter into the picture CPP, consulting psychologists press which is the current publisher of the MBTI, and they offered to buy it from her when she was on her deathbed. And the hitch was that they asked her to make a number of changes so they cut down the number of questions. And they also said your descriptions of the individual types are far too specific. We run the risk that if somebody gets a type and reads that type description they won't actually identify with that description. So we need to make these more general. And I think this is actually one of the reasons that people so often compare Myers Briggs to astrology, is because the incredible generality and the flexibility of those type descriptions seems really similar in both of those cases. But that was also a historical decision. It was a decision that was made CPP so they could start marketing the indicator as widely as they possibly could. Isabelle Briggs Myers agrees to these decisions and she sells them the indicator and she dies in in 1980.

AMT: Extraordinary story of two women.

MERVE EMRE: They are extraordinary and I think one of the things that I want people who read the book to come away with it from is to realize how much their biography actually undercuts the notion of type, that these are two women who could not be typed. They are completely idiosyncratic. And to quote one review which I really love they are "irreducible weirdos" and I think that really goes against the notion of type and the way that we have been taught to think about ourselves as types. I'm actually tired of thinking and talking about the self. And I think there is a limit to how productive those conversations and those questions about who you are can be. And I increasingly want to think more about not what does it mean for me as an individual to flourish. but what kind of a social world could we make where everybody could flourish regardless of their individual type.

AMT: Thanks for your work.

MERVE EMRE: Thank you.

AMT: Merve Emre wrote The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. New York Times critics have named it one of the top books of 2018. I spoke to her in September. What do you think? You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook, go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Lots to think about in what she said after what she’s learned.

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Dec. 12, 2018 episode transcript

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